"And then what?"
I sighed against my sword, leaning against the steel. The words were slipping out of my head. A thousand dawns, ten thousand more, and a spear for every star.
"What will you do then? You'll stand this watch, fine. You'll bury the old man. And then what?"
"It won't matter. I'll be dead, like the others. It'll be over."
"It won't. Not for us, not for the people of Ash. Something's happening, Eva. Something's rising up. You think the House of Morgan is being knocked down because it's weak? Or because it's the only strong thing left?"
"The hell do you know?" I looked at her over my shoulder. She had the shotgun in her hands, squeezing it until her knuckles were white. "What the hell do you know?"
"I know that this was a good man. That he saved me, and he's probably saved you a couple times, and Brothers know who else. And they killed him."
I stared down at the Fratriarch. He looked better with his eyes closed. I could imagine the bruises were just from some brawl he'd gotten into, like when I was younger and he'd take me to the beater bars. To see the heart of the fight, he said. To see the ugly, violent, desperate, raw center of combat. Without the banners, the armor, the horsemen. Without the reason. Just the fight. And he always came away from those things laughing and bloody.
I pulled his arms across his body, pushed his fists into his sleeves. Arranged the body as it should be arranged. Then I stood up.
"A thousand spears against the sky, Brother," I said, and took out the pendant that he'd given Cassandra, and she had given me. I tossed it onto his chest. "You leave some for me, eh. I'll be there in a bit."
I turned to the compass rose. Bad luck that they'd brought the body here. Drama, I suppose. And with my mind in its present state, there was no way I was going to remember the little dance Tomas had done, even if I'd been trained to the invokation. But Morgan always finds a way.
Stacking invokations of strength, flaring them hard until a wave of energy burned out of me, layers of noetic power shimmering at my every edge, I raised my sword on high, the blade pure white with the mystery and majesty of dead Morgan. I brought it down on the center of the compass rose.
The building shattered.
The delicate pieces of the secret compartment burst open. The floor lurched beneath me, and I stumbled back. The artifact rose from the floor, too quickly, and tumbled across the ballroom like a jack. It came to rest under the glittering night sky, beneath the ruined window. I went to it.
"What is that?" Cassandra asked, creeping up behind me.
"A lot of dead people, and the end of my Cult," I answered. "Other than that, I have no damn idea."
She ran her hands over it, her fingers pausing gingerly on the Amonite runes.
"You know what it is," I said.
"An archive." Her voice was quiet. She looked up at me, briefly, then back to the artifact. "Like a library. A whole library, in this one space."
"No wonder it's so damn heavy." She started to put her hands under it, as if to carry it off. "Seriously, it's a lot heavy. You should-"
Cassandra turned some knob and a ring of runed light began to orbit the device. She lifted it carefully off the floor with one hand. It hovered, about two feet off the ground, level with the girl's kneeling head.
"Oh. Well, not so heavy."
"That's enough," a voice said from the shadows. I spun my sword into a guard and gathered up what little remained of the invokations of strength. A man stepped onto the dance floor. A thin man, a delicate man. A sharp man. Betrayer.
"We probably could have done that, if we'd known it was so simple. Barnabas led us to believe that there was a bit of magic to the opening of the secret space. I suppose that sort of brutality passes for mysticism around here. Nathaniel said I should wait and see what you would do. I have seen."
He wore white, trimmed with pewter, and his face was hidden behind an articulated mask of iron. Chain belts crossed his chest, an iron ring at the center protecting the icon of the Betrayer. He moved like a dancer. Displaying empty hands, he twirled his fingers with a flourish and produced daggers. Damn show-off.
I raised my guard, invoked the Wall of Orgentha, and apologized to Barnabas for being the last, and for giving him such a crappy watch. It was all I could do.
"Cass, run!" I yelled. I took a step forward, sword over my head, and then… then I was flying backward, out the window, into the night. The girl's hand was on my shoulder, and all I could see was the rapidly diminishing window of the ballroom, and the Betrayer, and Barnabas's tiny, dead body on the floor.
* * *
We landed in the framework of an iron water tower about two blocks from the Strength. Even now there were sirens stretching up into the sky from the street below. We'd been seen. Not sure how you'd miss us, honestly.
"That thing can fly?" I asked, when I'd reoriented to my surroundings. The flight had been a strangely weightless affair, and it was odd to be back in gravity's fist. Cassandra was bent over the archive, slapping controls and muttering invokations.
"Nope. Not really. That was an egregious misuse of the technology." She smiled and looked up at me, like a kid in a candy shop. "And now I've broken it all to hell. But it was fun, yeah?"
"You shouldn't have done that. I could have taken that son of a bitch."
"Your Fratriarch couldn't take that son of a bitch. He's the same creep who jumped us outside the mono car. And I know you're all ready to die in the glory of battle, but I think you're going to be more use alive. Yeah. I sure broke something, didn't I?" She sat back on her heels and stared mournfully at the device.
"I thought you said it was some kind of library? Why make a library that can fly?"
"Not the point. The empulsor… the flying bit… that was just meant to make it easy to carry from place to place. Just meant to offset the weight. All I did was break off the dial and point it at the sky."
"So now it's going to be heavy again?" I looked down at the swarms of whiteshirts below us. A flight of valkyn was powering up at the foot of the Strength. I didn't want to fight the mundane army. None of this was their fault. "Because we need to get a move on."
"I can squeeze some lift out of it. Just…" She loosened two straps from the artifact's side, spun some kind of dial at the base, then humped the whole thing onto her back. Looked all the world like a firefighter's breathing rig. "Oof," she said, and settled under the weight of it. Looked tricky.
"I can carry that, if you want."
"Nope, I got it."
I chuckled. "Ruck full of food and you can't manage. World's heaviest book and all of a sudden you're the damned strong man."
"Priorities, dear. Shouldn't we be going?"
And so we should. The crowd below had seen our flight but not our landing. Spotlights were washing across the nearby buildings. The valkyn were taking a slow orbit around the Strength, their feet dan gling in the wash of their burners, wicked guns slung low from their shoulders.
We took a service walkway from the tower to a grubby-looking building that turned out to be a vertical farm. The glass windows were smeared with pollen, and the air buzzed with flies. Past rows of crummy stalks and into the central service core, and we never saw a soul. The main entrance to this place was below the streets, in the moldy, half-flooded worker tunnels that riddled the city. Bad lighting, bad mold… it was an unpleasant place.
I had to believe that Betrayer would be following us, but I had no idea as to their methods. I saw no value in hiding our tracks, not until we were good and safe from the mundanes. I was sorry to have missed a chance to fight Barnabas's murderer in open battle, but there was nothing for it now. The next time he would come in shadows. I'd be lucky to see the blade before it struck.